Edmodo

     Hello everyone! In this blog, i am going to present an app review: Edmodo. It is a very useful app both for teachers and students and even for parents to follow the educational activities of their children.

Through Edmodo, teachers can create digital classrooms where they can gather plenty of students under their classes with the class codes given as can be seen from the screenshot below. 

They can also share useful class materials such as videos, documents, links and images through this platform and they can give students various assignments by setting a deadline for each. 

There is a 'planner' section for the students that lists their upcoming assignments thus reminding them what's due. 

The platform also contains a 'discover' section in which students can improve themselves through challenging games.

In short, edmodo provides a digital learning environment where teachers, students and parents can cooperate to contribute the education of the students. 

Seesaw

     Hello! Today i am here again to share with you an app review and the task that i created with the app: Seesaw. It is basically a digital portfolio especially useful for students, teachers and even for parents!

 
In order to sign up, you need to choose from the options if you're going to use the app as a teacher, student or a family member.

 
If you are using it as a student, seesaw allows you to make your assignments in a creative way. You can enhance your assignment in your portfolio through a text, link, image, drawing, video, anything that you're feeling comfortable with presenting your ideas. This also helps teachers to get to know their students better and to make comments on the works of the students.

      

As it can be seen in the screenshot above, the seesaw app also offers some remote learning activities that students can benefit from during spending time at home. The activities are categorized according to the grade levels, topic and skills.
     It is also advantageous for parents because they can follow their children's activites through their portfolios thus, enabling them to take more part in the educational period of their children.

Here is the task i created;

*I opened a teacher account and i chose 7th grade for my english class*

Padlet

     Hello everyone! In this blog, i am going to cover a brief review of the app Padlet. Padlet is a digital board or canvas for people to create their own idea boards. In addition to creating, you can also attend to other padlets which enables you to work together with other people. 

As you can see from the picture above, the app allows you to make and join to padlets either through scanning a QR code or pasting an URL. Also, you can see the padlets you've created on this first page.

 
When you decide to create a padlet, there will appear some blank boards for you to choose a specific type such as wall, canvas, stream and grid. I chose to start with a grid to arrange my content in rows of boxes. If you are not sure which one to choose and start with, there are also preview sections for each type of board which allow you to see the structured examples of each. Moreover, you not only can add texts to your padlets but also links,images and videos as shown in the picture above.
   
     Padlet is quite suitable for teachers to use in a class environment if the facilities are provided. It can be used to provide collaborative learning among students by gathering them under one padlet board and topic through sharing links. You can also ask your students to add texts or images to the same board thus, enabling the brainstorming.

   

Animation

Hello everyone! In this blog, i am going to show you my educational experience with the app Toontastic. It helps to create animated scenes. Here is my animated class video;

Podcast/Vidcast

Hello everyone! Today i’m going to post one podcast and one vidcast about education.

Here is my podcast about two strategies for speeding up your reading: skimming&scanning. In this podcast you’re gonna learn about how and where you can use the skimming and scanning which are the fast-reading strategies.

my podcast

Here is my vidcast about how mind mapping strategy helps you to learn a foreign language effectively. It consists of three parts.
-part1-
part1

-part 2-
part2

-part 3-
part3

Hope both my podcast and vidcast will be beneficial for you:) You just need to click on the 'my podcast' , 'part 1' , 'part 2' and 'part3' sections.

Gistory App Review

     Hello everyone! As an introduction to the contents of my blog, i can say that i'm basically going to share practical informations about instructional technologies that can be useful both for language teaching and learning.
     My first subject will be about an app whose name is 'Gistory' and i will briefly share my observations.
     Surely, it is a very useful app both for children and their teachers to make the process of learning english more effective by providing creative materials such as stories including multimedia which makes it easier and funnier to grasp the information.

 
     As you can see from the screenshots above, there are some featured gistories such as 'Learning Present Continuous Tense', Around the World in 80 Days' and 'No Puede Ser Posible' to help you with your language and creating new gistories.

 

     For instance, the multimedia and the continuation questions in one of the featured gistories of a very famous book 'Around the World in 80 Days' create an enthusiasm about the book and the conent that needs to be learnt.
     However, there is a small problem about adding chunks which may result from the insufficient instructions given. As i said before, it is a well-thought app which might really contribute to language learning if teachers comprehend the importance of using these kind of creative activities in classrooms or as a task.